Manitoba is a Fantasy RPG Location

Just for fun!

It is currently Fall in Manitoba and this place looks like something out of a fantasy RPG. All that I'm doing for this post is sharing a bunch of photos I have taken over the last month. Most are just from hiking while on day trips from Winnipeg. A couple are from near Riding Mountain (which we did on an over night trip) and a few at the end are just from the weird things I encounter in may day-to-day life.

All photos were taken with my beat up old cell phone.

The idea for this post came from today's visit to the snake pits. Doesn't this look like the entrance to a dungeon?

But notice this detail... the floor of this sinkhole is crawling with snakes.

Here are some more cool places that I think come from a fantasy RPG...

Bonus, I accidently caught a reflection in the window when I took this one and it looks Lovecraftian...

And then we do a lot of 1:1 Scale Model Railroading in Winnipeg--here's a few images from there.

I thought the last few had a dieselpunk look to them.

As always, thanks for read (or looking at) this lighthearted take on Manitoba. Please feel free to post any questions or comments below. 

Ready Gamer One, the Other Old School Gaming …

TL;DR. I’ve already mentioned that when I was a kid, we were not really fond of corporate backed game design, but as I think about it, there is more going on here than meets the eye. Just as biological organisms evolve over time, so have TTRPGs. And there are two branches of gaming evolution which trace their origins to the 1970s. The first is nowadays called OSR which stims from D&D and licensed products. And the second is represented by the d100 family of games which emerges from Runequest. This second branch has a very different OSR feel, but it is still going strong. The games of this family use the idea of “homebrew” as a positive element of gaming, rather than a negative.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision which provides the greatest profit to the corporate IP holders.

 

Background Links. I’ve already talked about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as Northern California gamers, my friends and I were not big fans of corporate-sponsored games. If a game was published by TSR, it had to work harder for our acceptance. They were the mega-corp of gaming just as cyberpunk was taking form. Here are the links to my old posts on this.

Old-school Leftcoast Gaming. 

Magic systems. 

I think this attitude has had an important influence on the development of TTRPGs over the last half century, an influence that can still be seen in games today.

But, hang-on kids, our writer is a science nerd, and he’s going to make his point in his own way.

A Primer on Evolutionary Biology. Stay with me, I think this is important. When most people think of biological evolution, I suspect they think about mammalian evolution, or really almost any large, multicellular eukaryotic organism’s evolution. There is a slow change of a complex organism as it adapts to changing environment. Populations get isolated and eventually change until one population is different enough from the other that they are considered separate species. The normal stuff that most people learn in Highschool. There is a nice wiki page on it.

But there is another kind of evolution. Something called reticulate evolution (reticulate means basically “net like”). This is when two or more organisms merge large parts of their genetic material and create something new. It also has a nice wiki page, but it is shorter.

Complex multicellular organisms have a really hard time experiencing reticulate evolution. This is because developmental biology is really highly tuned. The slightest mistake can lead to a completely dysfunctional organism.  Our developmental programming locks us into a ridged state where we can only make tiny, little changes.

But single celled bacteria don’t have this limitation. They can change their genetic code wildly and still be a viable cell. Bacteria of very different linages—different species—even further apart—like to swap genes with the folks the met, at least from time to time. And this lets them explore a much wider range of living states.

In a sense, this is exactly what happens with TTRPGs.

Copyleft. In the 1980s, particularly in Boston and the Pacific Northwest, there was a strong sentiment against copyrights. Particularly with software. This is when we see the Free Software movement and the Berkely BSD license and so much more. This would eventually lead to modern open-source software and Linux and so much more. I suspect, but I don’t know, that it is even the earliest development in the modern Open Science movement.

So as a teenager in Northern California, this was a real thing. We understood that copyright, as it is usually represented, was a corporate thing. Cyberpunk was king, and copyright is what the corps do, copyleft is what the punks do.

And this showed in out TTRPGs!

Early Leftcoast Games. The first real Leftcoast game (that I can think of) was the Arduin Grimoire. But, let’s be honest. It was never a stand-alone game. It didn’t have enough rules. It was always meant as an extension for D&D. It was, in effect, a massive homebrew. You could grab bits and pieces that you liked and add them to your game. The background tables, of course. Kill Kitties, maybe. Phraint, sure.

And Arduin’s author David Hargrave famously had a falling out with the other big name of Northern California gaming Greg Stafford (who I never met). But both these authors worked in a much more left-leaning environment than our corporate friends at TSR.

And their games have evolved differently.

Evolution of Games. We can make an interesting comparison between the ways different games evolve. Early D&D (until it was bought by the Leftcoast company, Wizards of the Coast) was controlled by an American Midwest corporation that locked the game into a profit-driven evolution that resembles that of multicellular eukaryotes. Slow, structured change with minor variants being tested to determine their profitability. Those that win move on and those that fail are abandoned.

Hargrave’s work hasn’t moved on much—reasons. But Stafford’s games, and those published by his Bay Area company, Chaosium, still represent one of the largest, most popular family of games in the world.

“But Richard,” I hear you yell, “The d100 games represent hundreds of different games, published by countless small and mid-sized gaming companies. They don’t represent any ‘one thing’.”

And that is because the d100 games have always been advancing with reticulate evolution. Games like Call of Cthulhu and DragonBane and Mythras at first blush look to be completely different (and all appear different from my Rubble and Ruin). But they are not. With the d100 world of games, we take parts that we like and kludge them together into a functioning system. If you look at Basic Roleplaying  (The Big Yellow Book) it has countless optional rules that are included or excluded as the GM sees fit. And over time, more and more options have appeared.

But the underlying skill-based structure remains unchanged. Characters are not forced into roles based on “class” but rather develop organically with skills going up during play as independent of any corporate-ordained structure.

The Second Old School. I have a WIP, a new game I’m putting together. I call it Rustic Fantasy and it is the game I wish I had in 1980. The rules are a combination of a number of open RPGs, most are ORC Licensed, including Mythras Imperative, BRP, and Open Quest. And I would say this game is strongly in the second Old Scholl.

In the second Old School, you take the parts of all the games that you have, and you assemble something new and unique. Frequently you are creating a world and the rules that go with it. You, as a GM and invested players, are trying to fulfill a vision and make that vision come alive.

The current best example, in my mind, is DragonBane. This game is currently hot. I bought my copy at a local, independent bookstore. Didn’t need to special order it from my FLAG.

But it is just a form of Basic Roleplaying that has undergone decades of reticulate evolution. They’ve divided skills by five and added D&D “Advantage” and “Disadvantage” on rolls. And they have added new elements to match their vision. It’s a great game. A buddy of mine is running it on Monday nights and I’m really enjoying it. It is one strand of a net of games that are now and have always been popular.

Homebrew is Old School. Some folks use the term “homebrew” in a derogatory way to refer to games that are not run according to the rules written and approved by the corporate owners of the intellectual properties of a given game. I argue that this is where “the art” is. This is where the creativity comes in. Corporate games are so automatable that if you want to experience D&D 5e you can go play Baldur’s Gate. To me, the interesting part of the game is when you start changing the mechanics to reflect a different imagined reality.

Old School Two: Make the game follow your vision, not the vision that provides the greatest profit to a corporation.

We’ve been doing it since the dawn of gaming. It’s popular. It’s fun. If you haven’t, give it a try.

As always, thanks for reading my posts and I invite comments and questions below.

 

Need a Bioinformatics Job?

 

TL;DR. Job hunting advice from a guy with a good track record of landing bioinformatics jobs.

I woke up this morning with the urge to give some bioinformatics career advice. The bioinformatics job market right now is tight. It is difficult to land a good job, particularly for those who are ill-prepared.

Assumptions. You know what bioinformatics is and you are interested in working in the field.

Old Bioinformatician. I am one of the oldest career bioinformatic scientists out there. Not the oldest by any means, but I’ve been in the field of bioinformatics since around 1999 and did a fair amount of wet-lab before that.

I probably shouldn’t, but I read comments on Reddit r/bioinformatics and r/bioinformaticscareers all the time. And those two subreddits are full of people who don’t understand the field. You will see comments like “I applied to x hundred jobs and didn’t get a single interview”.

Buddy, you didn’t apply to a hundred jobs, you spammed a hundred employers. I have a master’s student who was looking for a job. We would look at each job description. I’d help him understand what they were looking for and what the work would be like. He would then craft a cover letter and resume for that position. He applied for about a half-dozen jobs. Got two interviews and an offer. (Of course he was well qualified and a great student.)

To apply for a job, you need to make it clear to the hiring manager why you are the right person for the role. If you just spam them with some premade documents and force them to try and infer your qualifications, they will ignore you in favor of the person who put the time into applying for the only role the hiring manager is currently looking to fill.

There’s an App for That. But that’s not what motivated this post. There is a population of bioinformaticians who approach bioinformatics incorrectly. I’ve been struggling for a long time for a way to articulate the problem, and recently I was talking with my wife about a student I had a consult with, and she came up with the phrase that summarizes the problem, “There is an app for that.”

In translational medicine we very frequently come across omic studies with complex experimental designs. We might have multiple samples from a patient, before and after treatment, affected and unaffected tissue, and blood. And they are almost always unbalanced designs. And there are frequently repeated  measures and time courses and all sorts of good stuff.

I work in a Medical College so the task of analyzing the data will go to some master’s student who has no specialized bioinformatics training. They will learn a little programming and some statistics, and they will lean into their assigned problem. These students are not the problem. My job is to help them learn how to correctly analyze the data. But it was one of these students that helped me articulate my concern.

This student had a complex experimental design with hundreds of samples all run through the appropriate discovery omic, for conversation, let’s say it was bulk RNASeq. They need to perform a differential expression analysis to find those molecular entities that are changing between before and after treatment etc.

They come in, we do a little prep work to get them ready, and then I routed them to our drop-in statistical coaching service. In this student’s case, they got a little over an hour with one of our PhD biostatisticians. I joined in for a bit of the conversation. They were given some instructions on what to do for next week (Drop-in stats is every Tuesday at Two) and they went away. They were to articulate a list of all the specific questions they wanted to ask the data and some other stuff. And then come back and we would work on the model statements for their analysis.

Three days later, they swing by my office. “Hey Rich, did I do this right?”

“What did you do?”

“I ran it through a specialized R library I found. It’s written for this type of data. I ran it with the default parameters. It should be right, right?”

If you do the math wrong, you get the wrong answer.

The probability that a bioinformatic tool will default to the correct parameters for your obscure experimental design are asymptotically approaching nil. I sent him off to see if he could find what model statements the tool has auto-magically generated before it sent them into LME for him – and we hope it was LME, it might have passed the differential expression analysis to a different library. Who knows.

The student assumed that if there was an “app” for the job, it would just work. And when it spit out p values, they must be the correct p values.

But this is my job, not a problem, they are a cleaver student and will quickly see where the biostatistician and I are guiding them. That’s not the problem.

The Real Problem. The problem is that a lot of bioinformaticians are learning to hit data with “apps”. Like the student, they are trusting that the tool will do all the correct steps without the operator needing to know what those steps are.

“If it is bulk RNASeq data, I run it through DESeq2, I get the differential expression results and I send it on to the next step in the workflow.”

But bioinformatics is mathematical inference—each computational step needs to be undertaken for a reason—and the researcher needs to understand both the reason for the step and how to perform it.

Nowadays, at least in translational medicine, almost all experiments are performed by a large team. Not every researcher on the team needs to understand every step in the computation, but they need to be able to trust that their bioinformatician does.

And there are an endless number of tools being written which do some neat, and worthwhile computation, and then the tool’s authors just tack onto it a few other steps so the tool can complete a full workflow. Some people treat these as “Apps”. They assume that the tool will do “its job” and that the numbers that come out are correct.

Unfortunately, you have to understand 1) what the tools is actually doing, 2) what computation you need in order to make your inference, and 3) what the question actually is that you are trying to make an inference about. So, in order, you need to understand the computation, statistics, and biology of the problem.

Career Advice. I see many students who are taking programs which teach you that this tool reads in this kind of data and spits out those numbers. “There’s an App for that.”  This is fine for two situations. First, if the experimental design of your data exactly matches that of the tool, it should work. Second, if there is a researcher above you who knows what they are doing and gives you the exact right instructions. In either of these cases, just knowing how to manipulate data to form the correct input format and graphing the output will be sufficient.

But, in my experience, most people who are looking to hire a bioinformatician aren’t looking for either of those (usually, those types of jobs do occasionally come up). Instead, they typically are researchers who understand the bench part of the job, and they need someone who can understand the computation and inference parts.

So, my career advice is, 1) show that you understand their needs. Don’t make them guess or try and read between the lines. Write your cover letter to exactly match the tasks in the job description. 2) Be brutally honest with your own limitations. Most hiring managers want to know what you can and cannot do. If you claim you can do everything, you end up looking like a duffus that no one would want to hire.  For example, I can’t write complex model statements in R. I’m a SAS guy. So, if we need a complex model in R with nested effects and random this and fixed that, I defer to the biostatisticians. But I can at least understand the design. 3) Remember that you are applying for a role in a team. Show that you can work well with others. That you listen to what people are saying and that you understand your own strengths and weaknesses. And the best way to do this is to listen to what they put in the job description.

Anyone can write some R code or Google what tool to use. Showing that you will be an asset to the project will increase the probability of getting the interview. And interviews lead to offers.

Good luck And, as always I thank you for reading my posts and remind you that I welcome comments or questions below.

A Little TTRPG relief from this Crazy World

 TL;DR. I drew some maps that I think are neat, and I’ve added some text describing a low-key fantasy setting that could be used as a starting point for something like an OSR Dragonbane or Mythras game or could act as a center point for either a low-stakes politics or cozy fantasy campaign.

 

I’ve been kind of quiet for a while, so I wanted to show you one of the things I’ve been working on. It is the type of fantasy setting my friends and I would have played in in the late 1970s. Would would have used Runequest rules and would have had much worse maps. Enjoy.

Gevensthorp is a small, fantasy settlement located on the shore below some highlands at the end of a long, narrow bay. It is (at first glance) a peaceful place, but it is secretly brimming with low-key political, cozy, or even OSR fantasy adventure—depending on how you want to play it.

1. The Thorp

Along a road that connects the bustling village of Redworthy and the villages, castle, and mines on the northern headlands, there is a small settlement composed of a few stone houses built from the obvious remains of an old fortification.

A. The Blemished Boar. Run by Geven the Younger (who is now in his 40s) and his wife and children, this is a small inn/tavern/roadhouse that is always busier than it should be.

B. The Houses. Across the road, there is a row of stone houses. The northernmost house is the home and shop of Geven the Elder, an accomplished blacksmith.

 All the other homes are occupied by his children and their families and friends.

C. Farms. Geven’s oldest daughter and her family manage a small farm which doesn’t provide enough to feed the whole community, but it does well for its size.

D. The Old Bridge. At the south end of the settlement is an ancient stone bridge built in the style of the Old Empire with a small two-story toll booth and home built on one side. There hasn’t been a toll in generations, but the home is usually occupied.

Secrets.

1. The oldest, and best kept secret is that Geven the Elder was once the armorer to the King and his wife was the Captain of the Queen’s Guard. They eloped and ran off together and settled in this out of the way corner where they lived a peaceful life and raised their family. Their youngest daughter, Crystal, still lives at home and has no idea of her parents’ past.

Occasionally, strangers still come to call and once a year or so Geven the Elder will craft a sword for one of them. The family lives a rustic life, but they never seem to want for money.

2. Just south of the village there are trails which head up into the highlands. They go to some old ruins, but they also connect across the highlands to the Eastmark. Although there is currently no open hostilities with the Eastmark, they are not part of the kingdom and trade with them is regulated. None the less, every week or so, a small pack train of mules comes from the mines laden with ores. These travelers stay the night at the Blemished Boar, and in the morning head into the highlands. When they return, they are usually loaded with crates and barrels.

2. The Tower of Laricus the Wise. A crumbling old castle, with the great hall and main tower burnt, the thin, outer walls in ruins, is just of the highland trail. This is the home of two mysterious, old wizards and their apprentices.

3. Chestnut Springs. A magical hot spring, and ancient and sacred pool, and a small grove of spirit-infested oaks form an unusual temple at the headwaters of the stream.

Three possible sites of adventure are just north of the settlement.

4. The Long Barrow. Long before the arrival of the Old Empire, which itself was long ago, someone built a massive stone structure and covered it with earth. Why? And what is inside? Maybe a small dungeon. Maybe a necromancer’s lair.

5. The Sea Cave. A deep, sea cave is cut right at the waterline. Is it the home of a sea hag, or some other creature? Have pirates built a secret lair to hold their treasure?

6. The Abandoned Toll-Bridge. Although the bridge is crossed weekly by pack trains, and once or twice a day by legitimate foot traffic, it is possible that the abandoned toll-house has attracted visitors. Maybe brigands looking to lay low or maybe a goblin or orc looking for trouble.

 1A. The Blemished Boar.

To the trained eye, the barn of the Blemished Boar was once a royal long house. But those style of structures fell out of use at least a century ago. Now it is just a well-made stone barn. Likewise, the unusually strong outer wall is clearly the remnant of an even older fortification. Most evenings the Boar is crowded with locals and a few guests. It is rare that there are more than half a dozen people staying the night, but it is not uncommon for folks to travel the few miles from Redworthy just to enjoy a visiting entertainer or a good batch of local ale.

 2. Tower of Laricus the Wise.

Laricus the Wise and the School of Esoteric Magic. A short walk from Genensthorp is the burnt out remains of a castle. The structure was a lightly fortified house, perhaps as recently as a century ago, but now the partially destroyed building is the home of several eccentric spell casters.

Laricus the Wise is an ancient man and a master of arcane magic. He may have an identical twin brother Daricus, or he might have a personality disorder. Reports differ. Either way, they never physically leave their tower. Instead, they spend their time exploring the mysteries of the Ethereal plane and those existences that can be found beyond it.

They maintain a small compliment of students who are mostly self-teaching themselves magic, but they do receive an hour or two of instruction from the master’s every week or so. In exchange, they have access to some of the items the masters collected before retreating into their tower. Generally, the students like the arrangement and are loyal to their teacher (or teachers).

A. Wizards Tower. When the masters hold class, they do so on the lower floor of the tower. The upper two floors are windowless and unseen by anyone other than the wizards. The lower floor has a chained library, a permanent magic circle and other items useful for learning magic.

B. Guest Tower. The wizard’s advice is often sought by outsiders, and the base of a small tower survives and has been converted to a guest room.

C. Tall-Tower Cellar. The main structure was once a tall tower next to the great hall. Both structures burnt a long time ago, leaving the hollow, stone shell which extends several floors upward and the cellar or ground level which was made completely of stone. The base of the tall tower has the only surviving entrance and the heavily vaulted room has been converted to a meeting room. Since the Masters will only see people (typically) one morning a week, when visitors arrive, they are usually first met by the students. And this is the space where they meet them.

D. The Kitchen. Once the kitchen for the entire castle, this space is now the common area for the students. They prepare their own meals, manage their own supplies, and generally use this space as their common room.

E. The Museum. The wizards have a bunch of stuff that is stored in this central space. Nothing of epic-power, but lots of small items that are useful in understanding the nature of both the physical and magical worlds. The students call it the museum and are often in here searching for clues to understand this or that rune or arcane formula.

F. Student Space. Once specialized storage areas for the castle, these small, stone-vaulted chambers are now the sleeping and practicing spaces for the students. Typically there are three to eight people studying magic here and the level of harmony withing the student population often reflects how crowded these spaces are.

G. Kitchen Cellar. Under the kitchen there is a dark and cool cellar that was formerly used to store food for the castle. The first section is still used for this purpose, but the students have taken over the back sections to serve as additional practice space.

 

3. Chestnut Springs

Nestled on the slopes up to the highlands, in a small and sheltered valley, there is a grove of ancient oak trees partially surrounding a mystical hot spring and a sacred chestnut tree. The site was once popular for the healing properties of its spring water, but the scattered ruins nearby attest to the decline in visitors over the last few decades. There are typically one or two clerics who tend to this holy place and depending on their nature, they may also be students of the wizards just down the trail.

A. The Long House. Built of salvaged stone, but in a style usually reserved for the people of the north, the long house accommodates both the clerics and any guests.  It can easily accept seven guests but is seldom called upon to do so anymore.

B. The Chestnut Pool. An ancient chestnut tree sits on a small (likely artificial) island in the center of a pool feed by two aggressive hot springs and partially enclosed by the old oaks. The site is understood to connect directly to the divine, but only the most devout will enter the upper pool due to its heat.

C. The Pool. During the centuries that the Old Empire ruled, a large wading pool was built. Here, the water has cooled enough that it can be enjoyed by those seeking healing or spiritual growth.

D. Pixie Pool. Small, natural pools have formed from the out-flow of the main pool. Some people believe that this site attracts pixies who live in the oaks, but others disagree. Either way, they are called the Pixie Pools.

The remaining sites are left undefined so that GMs can customize the location for their own games.

As always, if you have read this far, I thank you for your time and welcome any comments or questions below.

Philosophy is actually really important!

 

An Assertion. I am going to make the following claim without evidence. If people have reason to believe I am wrong, I legit would love to hear it (leave a comment below, please).

Most people think the discipline of philosophy is silly or useless.

I am now going to try and convince you this is wrong.

An Aside. Before I start, I want to mention that I only have three (maybe four) memories of interacting with professional philosophers. And the only important one is the time I got to meet Eliot Sober after he gave a talk at Oregon State University. I was very familiar with his work, having studied under someone who had studied under him. And at the time I thought about asking him to sign my copy of “The Philosophy of Biology” but I didn’t because I thought it would be too nerdy. Nowadays I wish I had. His work is a great asset to science and the world.

Background. So, I took a couple of Evolutionary Biology seminars and some more formal coursework in graduate school. People who want to understand biological evolution spend a lot of time thinking about what we know, and how we know it. And one of the professors had a cool way of thinking about the field of Philosophy and that is what I’m going to be writing about now.

Let’s start with two words, epistemology and metaphysics. First off, we should recognize that different people use these words differently. If you use them some other way than what I present here, groovy. But it is left to use to come up with some new word that matches the meanings of the usage I was taught. English be like that.

Epistemology is the study of the sets of rules different people use to decide what is or is not true.  If you believe that the only way to know truth is to read it in your magic book, then “reading it in your magic book” is your epistemology.

Most scientists have an epistemology that includes two things, empirical observation, and logical inference. You can be a scientist who accepts empirical observation, logical inference, and reading it in a magic book. But in the last half century, most of those people  are starting to have profound issues with cognitive dissonance, as most of the magical books make assertions that don’t literally hold up to the first two.

Metaphysics is, under this system, the list of things that you accept to be true. These are the things that you have found, or accept, based on your epistemology.

Different groups have different epistemologies and metaphysics. Some overlap between different groups. Some are reasonably unique.

Another short aside. Recently, I was involved with a Humanist forum here in Manitoba and I presented this approach to understanding people’s beliefs. In our presentations, the group would take breaks and have discussions around questions raised by the speaker.

I asked the attendees to talk about their own epistemology and metaphysics and one of the attendees made an interesting comment. Upon reflection, they asserted that they basically just believe what the people around them believe.

The core of my point. It is my considered opinion that humans are more of a perceiving and responding organism than we are a logical reasoning organism. We do both. But there are people who never really think about thinking. They don’t question “why” they accept something as true. They certainly don’t dive into critical thinking and the various types of logical fallacies (like my opening strawman) and they tend to just accept assertions made by the people they follow.

It's bad, even just among scientists. I tell my students I’m a professional cynic. I don’t believe anything “just ‘cause”.

“But Richard, it is in a peer-reviewed paper.”

“Yeah, but 20% to 50% of all peer-reviewed papers have non-trivial errors in them. Maybe up to a third have structural problems that invalidate one or more of their findings. Before I believe it, I need to do a little digging.”

Imagine how bad it is trying to understand what is true among the people who don’t have a rigorous epistemology.

So, let’s bring back the basics of philosophy. People need to understand how to approach thinking about things they don’t understand.

I honestly think that before people can understand what science is, or the dynamic relationships between and within various religions, they first need to understand the basics of how to think about thinking. And traditionally, that’s the realm of philosophy.

Secret Motivations. I actually have a secret motivation for writing about this. I want to introduce the idea of Philosophical Engineering which is an emerging approach to solving complex problems in biology and physics. Something that I have been spending the bulk of my day-job work hours on since last February. It’s really interesting, and I think it is a very promising approach to understanding, and correcting, all sorts of problems in complex, dynamic systems, but we can’t even start talking about it without first covering epistemology and metaphysics.

As always, thank you for reading, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Team Work makes the Game Work (?)

 

or Why I love the Fantasy Trip.

TL;DR. I’ve figured out that one of the reasons I run games is that I like to see groups of players working together to solve problems. And when a group is clicking, they will work at multiple levels, including the challenge in front of them and the story arc. And the story emerges from the individual character journeys.

Doom comes to the Monday Night game. Two weeks ago, I completely lost interest in my Monday night game. I’ve been running it for several months. I put a lot of effort into developing a setting that interested me—I like sandbox games where the players are free to develop the adventure according to their character’s interests and goals. I crafted a world that contained two classic OSR adventures, B2 Keep on the Borderland and B5 Horror on the Hill. I merged them with some really cool material from Raging Swan, and I ported everything to my favorite mechanics, D100 (I went with Mongoose Legend.) Then I added on the Sinister Secret of Saltmarch. The group did the haunted house, and we started the Caves of Chaos.

Along the way I realized I wasn’t enjoying running the game. Players were struggling with what I thought was a simple setting. No one wanted to play a character that was motivated for simple money, but no one could advance because they were always poor. We were just struggling.

And very few players had anything they wanted their characters to do.

And the fights were just boring.

The Problem. Now back in the day I could run games that were exciting, and everyone was on board with the action. A few players would drive the direction of the game and others would follow along because game play was always fun.

Tabletop roleplaying is constrained story telling. We’re not just sitting around building a group story. There are constraints imposed by the game system. In movie making there is something called cinematography. It has to do with what and how the visual images are presented on the screen. We might do a slow pan in on a pistol sitting on a desk. We draw the viewer’s attention to the pistol. Why? It must be important. At some point that pistol must play a role in the unfolding story.

In the same way, game mechanics—the physical rules of the game—act as cinematography for our unfolding story. They are a mathematical model that constrains what characters can do. I have 5 hit points. That’s not many. Will that be important to our story? The mechanics draw our attention to certain elements of the story and hide others.

If I used to be able to run games that interested me, but now I can’t, there are only a few places that things could have changed, the players, the GM, or the mechanics.

My players are as fine a group of players as I’ve ever had. So, they are not my problem.

I could have just lost whatever talent I had for GMing. It is possible. But I did put effort into this game, so I opted to focus on mechanics.  On where we focus the player’s attention. The first thing I did was look at reward structure for play. (But to be honest, at the end of a session, I was always so rushed that I didn’t do this well.)

Then I looked internally. I thought about what used to make my combats interesting and I realized that what had changed was the nature of fighting. The games that I play these days are built around the idea of heroic, or really super heroic, characters. Combat runs like a superhero movie. We focus on one character while they do a lot of things. Then we focus on the next character while they do their bit. Etc. But when your character is not in focus, everything is kind of boring.

So, I answered that with reintroducing interleaved combat. In this model of combat, everything is happening at the same time. No one gets the focus. Every character gets an action on each phase. What actions you can pick depend on the nature of your character, but everyone is potentially taking action at all times.

This worked great. It took a few weeks for the players to get the hang of it, but everyone agreed that combat was more fun. And I could clearly see that players were more engaged with the action.

So why did my interest suddenly die?

Realization. The answer was obvious. Once I recovered interesting combat, I realized that the game I had constructed focused on the wrong thing. The focus was on a series of combats—and we could pretty much map out what they would be. And at the end there will be a big, bad fight and the player characters will win or fail based on their preparation, luck, and die rolls.

And to me this was completely boring. It was missing a critical element, player character interactions...

Teamwork. I realized that once I had fixed the issue I was having with combat, suddenly I wanted characters that worked as a team. And I knew exactly how to do that. Basically, since I’ve been thinking about old school, Left-coast gaming so much recently (see for example here and here and here), suddenly I wanted that old-style of play were not only were characters constantly engaged with the action on the table, but all the characters had to act as a team in order to win. Characters have roles in the team, and the players need to build their characters to fit their role.

The Answer was in the labyrinth. Literally. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than play that old, Steve Jackson classic, The Fantasy Trip. In this game there are no random elements in character creation. You make the character you are going to play. But there are powerful constraints on what the characters can do. You can build a character to fit one role, front line fighter, ranged fighter, polearm-wielding second-rank fighter, support thief, sage, illusion-based wizard, and the like. If you are thoughtful, the character will be pretty good at their role, and if you really work at it, they can double in a second role.

But player characters are easy to make, and players are expected to keep a pool of characters around. For a given evening of play, they will pick the characters that they want to bring. They might want to build this fighter up, and they might feel that they need a scholar to tackle a specific problem, so for this game the player picks those two characters.

And in this game, all the players need to make characters that work together to accomplish the party’s goal. Failure to make a useful character is no one’s fault but yours. Experimenting is to be encouraged, but you made your character. If they are not working, make a new one.

For my campaign, I started with something simple. Everyone is on the island capital of the old empire, full of adventure. The empire was destroyed by powerful magic and outsiders are finally getting a chance to return. There is limited government and lots of opportunities to explore and gain wealth and power.

For each game session, the players get to pick one of three or so goals. There will be a known XP reward for each goal. Over time, I hope the players will propose their own goals. But to start with, the players can explore the edge of the mushroom forest for 100 XP, find a path to that castle over there for 125 XP, or explore what is behind that strange door for 50 XP + treasure.

Stories Emerge from the Actions of the Teams. Just as in other OSR games, the story will emerge from the series of actions that the group undertakes. It will not be something that I, as the GM, predetermined. Instead, certain players will like certain characters. They will pick adventures that those characters are good at. Overtime, the list of options for a given sessions adventures will come to be focused on what characters the players like to play, and a story will emerge.

And as the GM I will be able to watch this happen.

And that is what I like about running games. Not the banter between super powered characters, but rather the way a group of my friends drive the creation of a story, based on what elements of the setting they prefer to engage with the most.

As always, thank you for taking the time to read this post, and please feel free to leave any comments or questions below.

Old-School, Left Coast Gaming Magic Systems

 

TL;DR. Back in the day, in Northern California, my friends and I not only viewed TSR as a corporate bully, but we gravitated towards TTRPGs with well researched magic systems. Not well balance, but well researcher. And it occurs to me that many of these games were heavily influenced by the SCA.

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how in the late 1970s and early 1980s the people I gamed with in Northern California were not too fond of D&D. We loved TTRPGs but we had already moved on. For this post, at first I was going to only focus on Animism and the early days of Runequest. But I needed to look at my old copy of Chivalry and Sorcery in reference to my current gaming WIP, and when did, II noticed something which I had long ago forgotten. Something that strengthened my point but also broadened this post.

Background. Let’s remind ourselves about Chivalry and Sorcery. This game was first published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1977. It is a remarkably complex game, with prints of hand-typed pages. Tiny type, hard to read and full of endless charts and tables. I, of course, loved it!

This is an early game that tries to catch the look-and-feel of the real Middle Ages. Knights and Fiefdoms and Castles and all that. The game is what we would now days call “simulations”. It is trying to model somewhat realistically (through a somewhat Arthurian lens) the high Middle Ages. The cover image is a knight in full plate on horseback tilting with a dragon.

And inside, on the title page, is the text, “Dedicated to the Society for Creative Anachronisms (the S.C.A.)”.

The SCA. Once upon a time, there was a very large overlap, at least in Northern California, between TTRPG players and SCA members. Founded in 1966, in Berkly California, the SCA was a constant element of my early life. Almost all my friends were members. The SCA is still around. It is a Medieval reenactment group with a twist. Most reenactment groups put on public-facing “shows” that aim to be as accurate as possible. (I had a buddy once who was big into French and Indian War reenacting who would call the American Civil War reenactors “button counters” because they were always concerned with having the exactly correct number of brass buttons for the uniform they wore.) SCA people don’t have this problem—at least not at the time when I hung out with them. Instead, each person would research a time and place over an incredibly large space – if memory serves, it was from the year 500 to 1500 and any culture in Europe or that interacted with Europe. You would pick a time and place of interest and research the heck out of it. And then you’d start teaching all your friends about it.

For the record, this was all within a certain cultural framework. There would be “events” which had a regular structure and there was “fighting” which also had a different structure. But in general, the folks I knew spent a lot of time learning about history and teaching it to others—frequently through crafts and music and the like. There is a lot more that can be said about the SCA, but the key point is the SCA was never an outward-facing performance, instead it was an inward-facing educational opportunity. And it came out of Berkley.

And where did Runequest come from? Same place. (Well, Oakland and Alameda—the next BART stop south.) Runequest combat is a very good simulation of SCA combat. 

Researched games. I was going to write this post about animism as a magic system—and I will likely write such a post soon. Runequest was written by a cultural anthropologist with a history of interest in animism. And he built that into his game. Runequest has shamans and ancestor spirits and everyday battle magic and polytheistic religions with different cults being fundamentally different.

And the reason I was looking through my 1977 edition of Chivalry and Sorcery was to reference the historically based information about Western European magical beliefs of the Middle Ages.

Back in the day, we didn’t “make up” combat systems. We thought about what human conflict is actually like and tried to capture that in our games. Likewise, we didn’t always make up magic systems, but frequently we would ask, “What do the people who believe in magic believe it can do?”

Magic Systems in SCA-influenced Games. Chivalry and Sorcery came up with one answer. In this book they did things like divide magicians into a huge number of religious traditions. And these traditions were structured. There were Natural Magic Users which included drug-trace induced casters, those who evoked magic with dances and chants, mediums, and shamen. The Minor Arcane with the alchemists, artificers (who build magic items), astrologists, diviners, wizards and witches, evil priests, and covens. And then the Major Arcane with conjurers, enchanters (who use chants and song to create magic), necromancers, thaumaturgists, mystic cabbalism with their magic symbols, those who know the words of power words, and the numerologists. 

I don’t know who came up with this classification of real-world magical beliefs (I kind of think they grabbed it from existing occult works—maybe the Golden Bough, but I will confess, it is still my default way of classifying magic to this day. When I encounter people who believe in magic, I usually find they fall into one of these groups.

And Runequest found another answer. Buried in the Natural Magic of C&S were the dance / chant and shaman traditions. Both of these (and a few others in the Minor Arcane) reflect an ancient, real-world tradition frequently called Animism. One of the key influencers of Runequest was Greg Stafford (who I never met) and his interest was cultural anthropology.

Stafford was trying to create his own bronze-age cultures. And if the world had magic, then the magic should be a real part of the world, not just a set of random powers strapped on for a few lucky casters. So, he started from the assumption that the world worked the way that surviving religious traditions that were present in the bronze age believed it did.

Spirits were real. Shaman were people who could interact with them. Spells were gifts from the spirits (or maybe treasures wrestled away from them). Gods were powerful spirit-like entities that interacted with people. They had spirits of retribution for those that crossed them. They had gifts for those that worshiped them. And they had limits on their powers.

Limitations. The drawback to this approach is that we were frequently constrained in the types of stories we would tell. Powerful wizards were rare. Because most cultures don’t actually believe in powerful wizards.

Even when we would cut loose from the real world, we would play games like The Fantasy Trip and GURPS Fantasy. Two related games that do not have massive, Earth-shattering wizard types.

Advantages. The flipside is that you end up with a really good understanding of human cultures and religious beliefs. I live in Canada now and I am frequently near animistic rituals and enchantments. I find it easy to understand them and respectfully stay out of their way.

As a person who grew up in the shadow of the SCA and who played RPGs heavily influenced by their tradition of research, understanding, and teaching, I have a very different approach to magic in my worlds. In my worlds, if there really is magic, then the magic is real. It affects everything. If diseases are caused by spirits then they are not spread by microorganisms.

I wrote Rubble and Ruin to be a world that plays like a cannon fantasy game, but which doesn’t have real magic. Instead, I replaced it with science and technology. I’m currently working on a fantasy game that tries to capture the feeling of my old SCA-influenced RPG experience. It has real magic—and in that world it is real.

As always, thank you for reading this reflection on my early gaming experience. I always welcome comments and questions below.

p.s. A little true-confession at the end. I haven’t played Chivalry and Sorcery since forever, but I use it as a historical reference. I was looking at the current edition on Drivethrurpg and noticed that I own it. I must have gotten it in an early bundle or something—maybe I used some Rubble and Ruin money to pick it up. So, I start flipping through the pdf. Oh, they have cleaned it up. I bet they’ve fixed lots of bits and improved lots of others. But it is 583 pages long! That tells me just how much was crammed into the original work.